Final remarks, recommendations and perspectives

Recommendations regarding possible policies to be adopted in order to decrease Sieben Linden’s Ecological Footprint (EF) are hard to formulate as they may depend on the environmental metrics adopted: a carbon-only as well as a carbon-plus-energy analysis would indicate different weaknesses and strengths than an EF assessment. The main commonly recognised strengths of EF are: “its ability to condense the size of human pressure on different types of bioproductivity into one single value, the possibility to provide some sense of over-consumption, and the ability to communicate results to a wide audience”. In addition, the EF methodology does not account for the possibility of multiple functions of an ecosystem and this may result in a larger area of land being shown as required than actually necessary. The actual “public services” EF of Sieben Linden residents must be lower than the per capita share flatly applied in the EF calculation.